-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Don't freak with the address... I'm moving. Check the sig if you're paranoid. Tim's wise words were:
The issue is not unwillingness to use new technology, it is, rather, the issue of "stable attractors." That is, what can I/we reasonably expect others to also have. Clearly if I issued my paper to the list in FrameMaker format, or Acrobat format, or even TeX format, only a few people would be able to read it. Fewer still would actually take the steps needed to actually display the paper.
Standards, standards, standards!
I don't think the minor extensions to e-mail (loosely called "MIME," though MIME serves other functions besides attaching graphics) are worth the effort, frankly. Most of the MIME messages (the ones that tell me about "ISO 558972 fonts" and "Press any key to return") don't seem to warrant the effort....I think in 90%+ of the cases people simply send messages as MIME by default, not becuase non-ASCII stuff is included.
Well, ignoring the fact that MIME appears to be infiltrating the Web as well... I would differ with your analysis of MIME's lack of usefulness. It does provide a possible way to integrate PGP into the mail/Web landscape (from a crypto standpoint). Multimedia I'm not so sure about; I think the big draw to MIME will come when Person A drags and drops a spreadsheet into a MIME mailer and sends the message to Person B, who then clicks on an icon to pull up the spreadsheet. But I digress... I'd say, however, that MIME isn't a done deal yet, though it's getting there. Until it's there, it's probably a bad idea. It's been my experience that many mailers are just MIME-compliant enough to cause their users lots of headaches. (As I write this, I notice I'm using Eudora, which MIMEs all its stuff. Oh, well; I hope this message isn't too much trouble for y'all...)
If we make the leap, I say make the leap to the Web:
cave drawings --> text --> e-mail --> Web
(By Web I of course mean the whole ball of wax involving HTML/HTTP/etc.)
This is not a rejection of new technology, just a wise selection of which technology to bet on.
I vote for MIME-encoded cave drawings. :-) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLvCxGjER5KvPRd0NAQH+bgP8C5oOpT0Cgzh0m3yXYZmsvpaZqB5FuZUt ZFQAHkKrIhaJ39IBhcJXv9Xmda/Jhp2wluvMDKlyzDxG/lvHJnr+h4cTJEUq6H57 bWPuQO2MBuBViOE77GFKreFzyLeamidlIlva3cIm/m/eYQXcF8l5qsNRB6O5kGe0 wq97dXfrVQ8= =OyM1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----